This story is one of five stories in The Lens’ Embracing Katrina Narratives project.
For several years after the storm, Robert Green Sr., now 69, lived in a FEMA trailer next to a big American flag, two grave markers, and a sign that read, “Roots Run Deep Here.”
Though family often stopped through, he was largely alone on his block. He served as a neighborhood pioneer, handing neighbors cell-phone numbers he’d gleaned from storm-recovery workers and guiding countless reporters through the catastrophically damaged area.
He called his block “the wilderness.” There were no lights at night outside of his trailer. Nearby yards were heaped with wreckage and emptiness.
Some people were critical of the tour buses that began giving “disaster tours” through the city several months after the storm. Not Green. Buses and vans likely started driving down his stretch of Tennessee Street in January 2006, he says. About a week earlier, he had found his mother’s body on a roof down the street. Sometimes, the 2006 tour groups would stop and he would tell his story, his pain palpable. “I want people to know what happened,” he’d tell them.
He feels the same way about this week’s Super Bowl visitors: people have to know the truth. “You can’t ride through the 9th Ward even today and not see the effects of what Katrina did. To deny that is to turn your back on all the families who did not come back, the families who struggled to return.”
In 2009, Green moved into one of the Brad Pitt-planned Make It Right homes. When Pitt and his wife Angelina Jolie were in town, they would stop to see him and other early homeowners. Now, most of the Make It Right structures, including his, are suffering from the use of faulty materials and inexact construction. He posted a sign out front that reads, “Fix My House.”
The project was flawed, but it still had a positive overall influence, he believes. “No question about it,” he said. To him, the Make It Right project had finally attracted a critical mass of people back to the wilderness. And those people attracted more people to return to neighboring blocks, repopulating this part of the Lower 9. It was the catalyst they all needed, he said.
Now, every afternoon, multiple yellow school buses pass his house. “We have families here. Children,” he said. “A sign of progress.”
Months after the storm, Green was one of the first residents to return to this side of the Lower 9th Ward, between North Claiborne and Florida Avenues. His family house sat a mere two blocks from where a heavy barge rammed through a faulty Industrial Canal levee, leaving a 200-foot-wide gash in the canal’s eastern side, and slamming his home with nearly 20 feet of floodwater. Like many homes nearby, his family’s World-War II-era house rose off its piers and floated.
It was before dawn, at around 4 a.m. on August 29, 2005. Seven family members were in the house, including his younger brother Jonathan Green, their 74-year-old mother Joyce Hilda Green, who was sick with advanced Parkinson’s; his mentally disabled cousin, Hyman Sheppard; and his granddaughters, Shanai, 3, Shaniya, 4, and Samiya, 2.
Water rose rapidly, turning the house into a deep pool in a matter of minutes. His brother briefly ran into the dark outside to see if they could make it to a nearby two-story house. But when he hit the street, the watery rapids were already chest-deep. They didn’t have time to relocate anywhere else. Robert Green stepped on top of an armoire and reached the attic. Jonathan Green lifted everyone up to his brother.
But the water kept rising, right at their heels. It began filling the attic. Jonathan kicked out a section of roof and the brothers again pulled the family up, outside this time, into the pitch dark and pouring rain. That’s when the house began floating, breaking apart as it moved, with the two men gripping onto the shimmying roof, while trying to shield the others with their bodies.
Every year on August 29 – the day that Katrina hit, in 2005 – Green’s close-knit family — siblings, cousins, nieces, nephews, and his children with their children — gathers by the place where the house once stood, in shirts that read “Roof Riders” over a photo of a painting by fellow Lower 9 native Ted Ellis. The paintings shows a family – elders and kids — riding atop a floating house with a hole in the roof while a man at the front holds an American flag.
For 20 years, the annual procession leaves the property where Auntie Joyce once lived. They walk solemnly down Tennessee Street, following the route taken by the house, until they get to the large oak tree, where it stopped.
But in 2005, there was no time for a sigh of relief at the oak. With a wall of water pushing against the house, the structure began to splinter. And as the Green family tried to make their way onto a taller house next to the oak, Shanai, known as Nai Nai, slipped from the roof into the water. Her older sister Shaniya fell too but managed to paddle to safety.
That night their mother passed away as the family huddled together on the roof, waiting for the storm to weaken. As she faded, she said that she would care for Nai Nai, Jonathan told his older brother.
The next day, when their neighbor Earnest Edwards came in a bass boat to rescue them, they decided to leave her body there. Two months later, on Oct. 19, search-and-rescue teams recovered Nai Nai’s body near the tree. But no one could seem to find Ms. Joyce in the same area.
Frustrated, on Dec. 29, Green and a brother climbed onto the roof and, as they expected, found what remained of his mother’s body, clad in scraps of familiar clothing.
Not long afterward, he moved into a FEMA trailer. He placed two memorial markers in the yard and arranged for another FEMA trailer to house his adult daughters and their kids. With that, he was officially back. “I’m not giving up, this is home,” he’d say, whenever anyone asked.